An Army of Uno

He's been fighting to get better ever since. "Everything that I'd learned in all my life was blank, was just erased," he says, tracing his hand along the thick, crescent-shaped scar that stretches up the left side of his head. "And so, I had to start all over."

While sitting across the aisle from Angel on a bus headed for the Palo Alto VA early one recent Monday morning, his friend Cpl. Jason Poole talked about his first impressions of the newer arrival. Poole, 24, was a green card Marine from England who suffered serious brain injuries from a 2004 blast after he was "volun-told" to go back for a third tour of duty in Iraq. He, too, has since become a citizen.

"He didn't say anything," Poole says of Angel.

"I couldn't talk!" Angel retorts.

"He wore a helmet," Poole says with a smile.

It's the helmet he was wearing when he was sworn in as a citizen in July 2005, after his mother asked a VA staff member if Angel was eligible. Antonia, 53, says she knows that as a citizen Angel has more rights, but she's against anyone joining the military to get citizenship. She says she "loves this country," although she's not a big supporter of the war in Iraq. "I'd just like all those poor kids that are fighting over there to come home," she says. "I don't know what they're fighting for."

Kerri Childress, the Palo Alto VA communications director, handled much of the paperwork for the family. Angel says he "was still really messed up" back then, but remembers Childress asking him if he wanted to become a citizen. At first, he couldn't understand what she was saying, but he smiled and nodded "yes." He remembers people coming to his room to take a picture of him. Somebody recorded his fingerprints. And he remembers the date. "That's all I know," he says with a shrug.

When asked how he feels now about being a citizen, he said it's not much different from before, except for maybe one thing: "I can vote."

It's a common belief that San Francisco, if not the entire Bay Area, is such an anti-war region that hardly anybody joins the military here, but there are recruiting stations scattered everywhere from downtown to Daly City.

At a bustling Army recruiting station on Davis Street not far from Fisherman's Wharf, Sgt. 1st Class Mark Wilder says that each of his eight recruiters talks to between 80 to 100 people per week and are meeting their goals — in part because "the job market sucks here." The demographic of San Francisco recruits is similar to that of the city, he says, a mix of men and women — many in their late 20s. But it's different than, for example, Daly City. "We station a lot of Filipino recruiters there," Wilder says.

He says that the military is trying to help make it easier for green card soldiers to get citizenship, and he's a big advocate of immigrant soldiers.

"Back in World War I, World War II, they would say, 'I'm establishing myself,'" he says. "They would rush down and join."

An incident one afternoon last month at the Davis Street station perhaps showed why the military is turning to more foreign-born soldiers. Wilder, the station commander, had to turn away a persistent applicant who didn't meet enlistment criteria. The man was a U.S. citizen but reportedly had a seriously checkered criminal past, and Wilder accused him of "wasting the time" of one of his recruiters by repeatedly lying about it.

Margaret Stock, the West Point professor, says that spotty criminal records are one of many reasons a lot of American-born men and women can no longer qualify for the armed services. Others include obesity, health problems, and a history of drug use. Rather than lowering standards to accommodate citizen recruits, she says the armed services should reach out to more non-citizens. "The Pentagon is very practical," says Stock. "Non-citizens do better in the military."

Indeed, a 2005 study conducted by the Center for Naval Analyses, Non-Citizens in Today's Military: Final Report, found that non-citizens do extremely well in the military, and are less likely to drop out than citizens.

Critics accuse the Pentagon of creating a mercenary military, and yet another category of work that citizens will no longer do. Some liken it to the decline of the Roman Empire, saying that the ideal of the citizen-soldier will give way to private contractors and foreign fighters. Nonsense, says Stock, who insists "it won't end up being jobs that Americans don't want. It will be a higher-quality force."

A Filipino recruiter who works with Wilder in the Army's Davis Street office, Sgt. Rey Bagorio, is arguably one of those immigrants creating "a higher-quality force." Bagorio is praised by his boss as a success story — a professional "hard worker" who "takes good care of himself" by going to the gym every night.

Bagorio was born on Sept. 11, 1981, in Manila, where he says his family lived in a small house, a "homemade type of deal." At age 7, he moved to Hawaii with his mother (who was sponsored by his grandmother) and thought the United States felt like "heaven." He had uncles and cousins in the Philippine army, and he decided to enlist after high school. After a Marine Corps recruiter in Hawaii told him to wait outside until he got back, an Army recruiter stationed at the neighboring office invited him inside and offered to let him watch a video while he waited. He watched in awe; it was the first time he saw someone rappelling off a helicopter, and Bagorio decided to enlist in the Army the following day.